Exits: A wide-eyed supplication
Grace and the Memphis Grizzlies.
Youth may be wasted on the young but it’s saved the Memphis Grizzlies. In two seasons, since Ja Morant, Taylor Jenkins and Zach Kleiman got there, since the team began drafting for chippy but sage, sound souls in undervalued college players and the front office realized the value in giving assistants and personnel only green in NBA job titles a chance, Memphis has handled rawness as a precious resource.
A clean slate is so rare in the NBA. Not a rebuild, or a retool, or a painstaking effort at erasing all the black marks a franchise can bear, but a true spring. Jenkins and Kleiman seemed to realize that rarity, the plot of promise on the wending banks where the Mississippi splits Arkansas and Tennessee, high country in lowland, a city built on a bluff, steeped in the truth of laying your heart on the table. Frank Stokes, Robert Wilkins, Hattie Hart, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nix and yes, sure, Elvis, haunting despair with a hook in small rooms choked by heat, blues tingeing everything from their voices to the rings under their eyes to cigarette smoke hanging in shroud. And the Grizzlies, in their cool powder blue, a nod to the history with none of its weight.
56-26 is nothing to scoff at, not when the seasons before couldn’t crack 40 wins.
What’s been effortful with Memphis has been these last two years’ toll, the illusion of a secure state of health upended, same as anywhere, and injuries. Otherwise there is no team happier to shed the burden (feigned or for real) of struggle in favour of reflexive joy.
To watch the Grizzlies work is to reconsider what we even consider work to be — substantive, consuming, rudimentary manipulations under the stern eye of time. Grit n’ Grid, I get it, I guess, to play with guts and a pulverizing quality of speed and ingenuity, but on the floor it’s Morant’s airiness, Dillon Brooks’ velvet gloved volatility, Jaren Jackson Jr.’s sure long shots, Brandon Clarke, prowling the paint. Desmond Bane, maybe the closest to team slogan for what he wants to prove, but then Bane on the floor is a furious calculator, and Xavier Tillman, fleet-footed until he has to plant and upend somebody, like Steven Adams, more heart than toil.
The progress here, season over season, is nothing to scoff at either. For Jenkins to ask his young team to hone itself, hold off on the fireworks when sparking them comes second nature, understanding that to turn this group one-dimensional by letting them lean into only being the explosive, gangly, lots of fun but no traction team, would be a waste. There are growing pains in that — Jackson Jr.’s streaky shooting, Brooks’ unpredictability, the stability of pace and a team that no matter how sure-footed and improving, remains so susceptible to the overarching conditions of the Western conference.
There’s a low-rise apartment complex behind my house. There’s a thin band of green around the place, then a laneway, our landlord’s detached garage and then the yard, a bit wild and right now exploding with the white froth of hydrangeas. It’s the illusion of space and separation you have in a city, the short distances and soft buffers (trees, sidewalk or alley, yards) that bubble your life even when it’s butting up and overlapping against other people’s all the time, while theirs do the same, allowing you all some reprieve.
At about 7:40am, since late-June, light shines through the back windows of my apartment, the kitchen and bathroom, bright as brilliant sun. But the sun, by then, has already come up, and it’s come up on the other side of the house, washing the living room in a soft honey that smears down the hall but doesn’t quite spread past the bedroom. The bathroom, also at the back of the house, has a panel of glass blocks in the outside wall leading up to a sliding window high enough for privacy, and the strange and luminous western sunrise blasts through them, refracting dizzy, abrupt light that cascades as suddenly as someone opening the door after a long, hot shower, steam billowing.
The first time it happened, or the first time I noticed it, I went into the kitchen and looked out the window, looked up. The sky was lightening to a powdery blue but there was no source to explain the floodlight. Then I looked down.
It was, momentarily, like glancing at the sun. And like glancing at the sun I stupidly looked back. Through morning eyes made to squint double I could make out sharp edges and the molten shape of a rectangle. It was a mirror. Big and set out (I think) for storage, leaning up against the brick wall of the ground level apartment’s walkout yard, angled so that when the sun climbs high enough to slant over the roof of our house in the morning the light bounces over the laneway and directly back to our place.
It only lasts for about ten minutes, before the sun gets higher and the brilliant wash of light dries up. Ten minutes where our place is infused with light streaming in from every window and the source, beguilingly, the same. Like the sun, briefly, dropping by for a coffee.
We started calling it apartment-henge. Whether us moving out in August or whoever owns the mirror removing it comes first I’m already a little sad for the day when I wake up and the light is dimmed, gone back to just regular morning light. So I revel now in it, happily dumbstruck and blinding myself with glances down most mornings, waking up in a world, briefly, overflowing with light.
I think of Morant’s legs every time he leaves the earth. Not in how they get him there, there are certain mysteries I’m fine taking at face value, but in how ravenous the impact of coming back down can be. That and they are long, and there are times when you can see the brunt of force at landing buffet up them heel to hip, the crude jealousy of physics clinging like a scorned lover looking to make up for stolen time.
Morant embodies grace more than any other athlete, I’m sure, that trembling precipice before one action tumbles into the next, before the up comes down, before reward. Morant hanging impossibly long in the air, working his dunks on us like prayer beads, aerial benediction, a wide-eyed supplication where one’s chin thrusts up and pulls the jaw open in awe instead of tucking to the chest in deference. Watching Morant, we forget the work it all takes. His ease and our ready breathlessness, eschewing exact right conditions.
Fluttering gasps of grace, precipices of pleasure, accidental as someone knocking a hand against the hard point of your hip, a sunset bleeding out in the pocket of clouds overhead when you come up from the subway. Or else the kick in your chest that comes when you watch, gleeful, as what you want tidies and aligns itself, curls around your body like an animal warming to you, its big eyes rolling back in their sockets with satisfaction, Caravagesque.
When I got back from Las Vegas, before I got too sick, I noticed one morning the glut of light was gone. It was still lovely, summer mornings always tend to floor me, but the sun was only padding soft the one way down the hall instead of simultaneously kicking in through the back windows. The mirror broke, Dylan told me. He noticed it one morning, split into pieces, and then a few days later it was gone.
There’s grace split or shattered, blessings and benedictions that expire, charm that tarnishes, luck that skips out, the indulgence is always in the catch. We think of grace as attainment but it’s split equal with loss, something shedding from us, stripped or falling away. The jolt of realization, the breath hitched, hang time, glancing at the sun — living, for however many beats, outside of yourself, brain lurching with the understanding that it’s about to be over.
These brief snatches of time, golden and beholden to nobody but you.
Love this piece.